Bring back
Today’s expression is “bring back.” It’s a phrasal verb with a few different meanings, but we’ll focus on just one meaning today.
When you bring something back, you return to a place with a thing. It sounds simple, but there’s a specific way to use it. So you have to be in one place, you have to leave, you have to get something else, and then you have to return to where you started. All that has to happen to use “bring back.”
So imagine you’re at home with your spouse or roommate or something. You have to go out to do some errands during the day. Your spouse can ask you, “Can you bring back some dinner?” The question is, while you’re out, can you get some dinner, and bring it back to the house with you? This has all our ingredients. You’re at home, you leave home, you get something else—in this case dinner—and you return to your house with that thing. So you can bring back some dinner.
In today’s main lesson, we were talking about dogs . Hunting dogs, specifically, were trained to bring back game that was shot on a hunt. “Game” in this case is like a wild turkey or duck or something. So what happens? The hunters shoot a duck, say. The dog is in a boat with the hunters. The dog leaves the boat, gets the duck, and returns to the boat with the duck. He brought the duck back to the boat.
Any parents in the audience ever travel without your kids? If so, you probably bring back a present or a souvenir for your kids. If you travel without the family, for work or pleasure, you leave, you get a present while you’re out, you bring the present home, so we can say, you bring back a present for the family or you bring a present back for the family.
Now here’s another way to use “bring back.” If one person brings something back for someone else, you can say bring me back, bring you back, bring him or her back. So your kids might say as you leave, “Can you bring me back a present?” That’s another way of saying, can you bring a present back for me? Of course, you might answer, I’ll bring you back a present.
Here’s another example. Say you’re at work and your colleague passes by your desk. Your colleague is going out of the office for some reason, and your colleague will be coming back. Your colleague might say, “I’m going out. Can I bring anything back for you?” That’s a generous offer.
And you might think about it and you might say, “Sure, can you bring me back a salad from the restaurant downstairs?”
JR’s song of the week
It’s time now for JR’s song of the week. This week he has chosen, “Still Falling For You” by Ellie Goulding. It appeared in the movie, “Bridget Jones’s Baby” in 2016. There’s a good phrasal verb in the title; to “fall for” someone is to become emotionally attached to that person, usually as a couple. Anyway, this song has an upbeat melody, a nice bright, high energy sound. “Still Falling For You” by Ellie Goulding is the song of the week. Thanks, JR!
See you next time!
That brings us to the end of today’s audio lesson. Remember that the full and complete lesson is at PlainEnglish.com/469.
And you might wonder, what’s included in the online lesson that’s not in the audio? There’s a lot. First of all, there’s a full transcript, and that’s free. There are links to English articles about this topic in case you want to read more. That’s free. We describe yet another informal English expression in a section called “Learn the Lingo”. That’s free. All that at PlainEnglish.com/469 is free.
Now, if you want to dig deeper and get some real active practice, we have a few more parts of each lesson that are open to Plain English Plus+ members.
There’s a step-by-step video lesson that talks about how to express more complex ideas in English. In today’s video, I walk you through how to talk about what happens next in a series of events. So if you’re telling a story about something that happened in the past, you’re going to need to transition from one step to the next. And in today’s video, I give you an extra little tool for that.
What else? There’s more. You can also practice using what you learn by writing your own sentences with “bring back” and the other parts of the lesson—and I’ll read your examples and give you personal feedback. And we have a full page of exercises. There are too many to name here, but they help you with listening, speaking, vocabulary, and grammar.
So when I say that JR has uploaded the full and complete lesson to PlainEnglish.com/469, I’m not joking…it is full and it is complete. There’s a lot to explore if you haven’t yet been on the site. And if you want access to those resources for Plus members, you can join at PlainEnglish.com/Plus .
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